RIVERSOUTH project in Fairview moving ahead

Developer Andrew Brickman and city officials are ready to move ahead with bridging a gap in architectural style in Fairview Park.

Representatives from Dimit Architects and Abode Modern Lifestyle Developers will be presenting plans for Riversouth, Brickman’s eco-friendly, luxury townhomes, to the Fairview Park Planning Commission at its meeting at 7 p.m. tonight. The multimillion-dollar project includes 34 luxury homes of between 1,200 and 2,200 square feet each, with prices listed as from $229,000 to $479,000. Like other recent Fairview Park development projects, the city has given it a seven-year tax abatement package.

Abode project officials have placed the homes on the former Mandley-Vetrovsky Funeral Home and a former residential home’s properties located near an entrance to recreational facilities in the Rocky River Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks and the Fairview Hospital campus. Some of the nearby facilities include running and biking trails as well as a Metroparks golf course. The Gemini Center is a short distance away. The homes are also located near retail shopping centers in Fairview Park, Rocky River and Cleveland and near the RTA bus line.

“It’s a great project, people are going to love it,” Brickman said at a kickoff party for the project, held at the Vosh club in Lakewood.

Fairview Park Mayor Eileen Patton said the homes will provide a beautiful entrance to the city’s eastern border.

“We’ve had largely Western Reserve architecture before,” she said. “This will be an exciting, new addition to the city.”

She said Brickman and his group have worked closely with city workers on the project, while noting several council and administration officials were also at the Thursday gathering.

“A lot of people have worked very hard to put all of this together,” she said. “It’s something all of the city will be proud of.”

There were renderings and pictures of the project on display at the event. Shuttle buses were also available for any of the 250 guests to go to the nearby Clifton Pointe project in Lakewood and see those dwellings, which were also designed by Dimit.

Brickman, whose development group also has done other Westshore projects, such as Eleven River in Rocky River and Clifton Pointe in Lakewood, said they want to move ahead as quickly as possible.

“Weather permitting, we’d start construction around February in 2014,” he said. “We already have commitments for some of the properties, so we want to get them ready as quickly as possible.”

He said the homes will be like his other Northern Ohio projects and have aspects that will be unique to its specific community.

“We’ll have something which will be honoring the Jordan family and what they meant to the city historically,” he said. “We design all of our projects to become an important part of their city. We try to give something back to the community because it’s bringing us into it.”

He said Dimit and other staffers at Abode have been busy preparing the project.

“We have a great team,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of successful projects, and we’re going to have many more in the future.”